Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Transformative Yoga Psychology Based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo

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Item Code: NAC908
Publisher: D. K. Printworld Pvt. Ltd.
Author: Debashish Banerji
Edition: 2020
ISBN: 9788124606230
Pages: 461
Cover: Hardcover
Other Details 8.9 Inch X 5.9 Inch
Weight 770 gm
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Book Description
About the Author

Groomed in a modern academic tradition and post-Enlightenment ideals of creative freedom and social critique, Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) turned his attention to yoga and the limits of consciousness in its ability to relate to and transform nature. In the process, he documented scrupulously his experiments and experiences based on a synergistic existential framework of practice.

Debashish Banerji correlates the approach to yoga Sri Aurobindo took in his diaries with his later writings, to derive a description of human subjectivity and its powers. Banerji constellates Sri Aurobindo’s approach with transpersonal psychology and contemporary lineages of phenomenology and ontology, to develop a transformative yoga psychology redefining the boundaries and possibilities of the human and opening up lines of self- practice towards a wholeness of being and becoming.

Opinion

Both scholar and Yogi, Aurobindo (1872-1950) carefully documented the unfolding of spiritual consciousness starting shortly after his deep revelatory experiences white in prison in 1908. His observations were recently published in a two volume set, The Record of Yoga. Debashish Banerji has analyzed this work and offers a detailed, clear, systematic and inspirational interpretation of how the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo may be understood and practiced.

Debashish Banerji is a professor of Indian Studies and Dean of Academic Affairs at the University of Philosophical Research, Los Angeles. He is also an adjunct faculty in Art History at the Pasadena City College; and a Research Fellow in Asian and Comparative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco. Banerji is the author of the book The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore (Sage,2010).

 

Foreword

Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) not only wrote voluminously about world philosophy, but he also practised philosophy, in the age-old Indian tradition of the sadhu (sage or seer). Both a scholar and a yogi, Aurobindo carefully documented the unfolding of spiritual consciousness starting shortly after his deep revelatory experiences while in prison, in 1908. His meticulous personal observations, about his spiritual path, were recently published in a two-volume set, Record of Yoga. Debashish Banerji has scrupulously analysed this work and offers a detailed, clear, systematic and inspirational interpretation of how the yoga of Sri Aurobindo may be understood and practised.

True to Aurobindo’s own grounding in the Western philosophical tradition, Banerji provides bridges between the language and outlook of Asia and Europe. Heraclitus, Plato and Nietzsche helped shape Sri Aurobindo’s thought, as much as the Vedas, Upanisads and Gita. Banerji employs the insights of Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger, and Husserl to explain the yogic principles of will, spontaneity, and intentionality and the thinking of Deleuze and Irigaray to explore yoga’s emphasis on relationality and transformation. The scientific research of Barbara McClintock and Evelyn Fox Keller similarly, provide apt metaphors employed by Banerji for understanding the complex yoga as articulated in Record of Yoga.

Aurobindo fashioned an architectonic for entering into the experience of yoga, similar to the yantra or mandala constructed by some advanced practitioners of tantric or Buddhist meditation. Aurobindo’s architecture of spiritual experience has seven pillars, each containing four major components. Within this edifice, the spiritual aspirant or sadhaka establishes a habitus, a way of being in the world, a prism through which all action and thought can be reflected and understood and made spiritual. The seven aspects emphasise one’s mental outlook, advocating equanimity and strength amidst all change, the importance of knowledge, the centrality of bodily health and experience, the need for the purification of one’s comportment and demeanour, and the transformation of all experience to spiritual bliss. By conveying this system in its complexity, Banerji captures both the joy to be found in laughter, beauty, and delight, and the hard work to be accomplished through spiritual austerity (tapas).

In addition to providing accessible explanations and charts for some of the more esoteric aspects of Indian thought, such as the cakras and the five breaths, Banerji elucidates philosophical subtleties, exploring the relationships among equality, power, and knowledge. So many stellar themes abound: intuition, observing, austerity, bliss, the nature of surrender, and the vaunted state of desirelessness, to name a few. By carefully engaging and reflecting on this book, the reader will catch a glimpse of what the Bhagavad-Gita celebrates as selfless action. By performing action, not for the sake of oneself or to feel the pleasure experienced by others, one does honour to the divine force, the Oversoul or Purusottama, through which one can know the eternality and delight of existence.

 

Acknowledgements

In the summer of 2007, Richard Hartz of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives visited the Gnostic Centre in Delhi and gave a series of lectures relating Sri Aurobindo’s Record of Yoga to certain passages in Savitri. Though the Record of Yoga had been published in book form a few years earlier, I had found it inaccessible, but Richard’s talks and my conversations with him, fired my interest and provided the key for a renewed attempt to approach the text. Further, Richard pointed me to the glossary of Sanskrit terms in the Record of Yoga, available at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram website, and armed with these new resources, I turned to my own studies of this text. Hence, I dedicate this book to Richard Hartz and his many years of patient work at the archives.

In 2008, I gave a set of 10 lectures on the seven quartets of the Record of Yoga at the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles, which were turned into a course titled the “Yoga of Integral Transformation”. These lectures form the basis for this text. For this opportunity, I offer my deep thanks to Dr. Obadiah Harris, president of the University of Philosophical Research and to my students at the university, who took the course for two winter quartets, helping me, thereby, to fine-tune the material. My special thanks to Jeffrey Snider, who sponsored the transcription of these lectures, which I used to create this text.

For the initial work of transcribing, proofreading and helping with the editing of the text my thanks go to Subash Mutsuddi, Rakesh Gade and Sundeep Pattem. For reading through the text and offering valuable suggestions, I thank Keka Chakraborty, Vincent Massa, Rich Carlson, Richard Hartz and Christopher Chapple. Others, too many to name, have read through parts of the text and have offered their suggestions, and for this my thanks go out to them. For preparing the charts to go with the text, Amrita Banerji and for the cover design, Zach Penman receive my sincere gratitude.

Last, but not the least, my thanks to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, with whose kind permission, I have included source materials from the collected works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

 

Introduction

Sri Aurobindo grew up in England, where he came to know very little about India or things Indian. After his schooling, he took to the study of Classics at Cambridge University, where t encountered the Sanskrit literary tradition. He returned to India in 1893 and joined the services of the ruler of Baroda, where he worked in several administrative positions and as a teacher at the Baroda College. There, he also consolidated his knowledge of Sanskrit, learnt a number of spoken Indian languages and plunged into the fledgling movement against British colonialism, becoming one of the first to declare complete political independence as India’s goal. In 1905, he left Baroda to come to the forefront of the struggle for freedom, becoming n of the initiators of what has been called the svadesi movement r Calcutta, the then British capital in India. It is here that he came across an instance of the exercise of paranormal power that opened his mind to the potential of yoga to affect phenomena beyond normal means. He described this event thus:

I first knew about yogic cure from a Naga sadhu or Naga samnyasi. Barin had mountain fever when he was wandering in the Amarkantak hills. The samnyasi took a cup of water, cut it into four by making two crosses with a knife and asked Barin to drink it, saying, “He won’t have fever tomorrow.” And the fever left him.

An Incalculabe Yoga

Barin was Sri Aurobindo’s younger brother and a collaborator r his anti-colonial efforts, as a leader of terrorist activities. He knew a yogi and when Sri Aurobindo expressed his interest in yoga as a means to acquire power to liberate the nation, he introduced Sri Aurobindo to this yogi, a Maharashtrian by the name of Vishnu Bhaskar Lele. They met in Baroda in 1908 and Lele taught Sri Aurobindo meditation as a first step to quiet his mind. The result of this meditation was profound and beyond the expectation of both Lele and Sri Aurobindo, as it brought him the realisation of the unreality of the phenomenal world, complete cessation of thoughts, and the perception of an intangible Permanence backgrounding all things. This realisation of nirvana, or what Sri Aurobindo would later call “the passive Brahman” became from then the basis of Sri Aurobindo’s life experience, a condition in which he received intuitions, perceptions, directives (ade4a) and further experiences leading him through the steps of what he called “an incalculable yoga” and which he later formalised under the name “Integral Yoga”.

Sri Aurobindo’s political activity continued through all this, and later that year (1908) he was incarcerated along with Barin and other revolutionaries on grounds of “waging war against the king”. The imprisonment lasted for a year during which Sri Aurobindo’s yogic activities intensified and a number of other spiritual realisations came to him. These can be summarised as:

(1) the realisation of what he would call “the active Brahman”, a conscious energy formulating itself into all objects and entities in the universe and at work in them;

(2) the realisation of a person aspect to indivisible Reality (Vasudeva, Sri Krsna), present as the essence of all things and in blissful relation with him (lila);

(3) a hierarchy of impersonal planes or ranges of mind above the normal human mind, leading to a Cosmic Mind (Overmind) and a transcendental Origin of Knowledge (Supermind) of which our universe is a manifestation as a form of Idea (Real Idea).

The Seven Quartets

After his release from the prison, he spent another year in Calcutta continuing his political activity, but departed successively to the French colonies of Chandernagore and Pondicherry, following inner directives (adesas). In April 1910, he settled in the south Indian seaside town of Pondicherry, never to leave this city for the rest of his embodied life. Sometime in the early years of his settlement in Pondicherry (perhaps between 1911-12), Sri Aurobindo received a systematic programme of yoga made up of seven disciplinary components, each with four goals or “perfections”(siddhis). He referred to this programme as sapta catutaya (seven quartets) and began organising his experience to himself in terms of this disciplinary structure from 1912, recording his practices and experiences along these lines in diaries or notebooks, which he titled “Record of Yoga”. In November 1913, he noted down this scheme of the seven quartets on some loose sheets and began elaborating on them, a process which remained incomplete.

He may have also lectured on these quartets to the small group of disciples who stayed with him in these early years. From a number of disciples’ notebooks, we find transcripts of “scribal notes” on these quartets, which are invaluable in filling the gaps and providing a closer view of what he may have meant by the distinctions he drew. From 1914 to 1920, while continuing with relative regularity his diary entries, he also wrote articles for the journal Arya, within which all his major writings were serialised. Among these articles, was his series elaborating his teaching of yoga, which is now available as The Synthesis of Yoga. This text also amplifies the teachings of the quartets and often provides a clearer key for understanding some of its obscurities.

I have drawn on all these and a few other sources, to present the description carried in this book. While such a presentation could be taken as a window into the life of an extraordinary individual practising an exotic discipline about 100 years ago, I believe the intent with which these practices were undertaken, should not be lost sight of in reference to human subjectivity in its present hour of world civilisation. Sri Aurobindo embarked upon the path of yoga as the revolutionary impulse of a modern subject at the cusp of twentieth-century modernity, marked by colonialism. Colonialism is politically no more with us, but the imprisoning forces of modernity are all around us, colonialism continues to haunt developing and underdeveloped nations socially, economically and culturally, while neo-liberal globalisation anonymises humanity across the world, populating planetary cities with complacent quasi-androids in programmed eagerness to consume packaged lifestyles coded for degrees of happiness. The gift of fire with which humanity began its ascent into self-consciousness, today bums no more in human hands, but fuels huge impersonal circulations of capital to which humanity remains imprisoned. What the seven quartets of Sri Aurobindo represents in this situation is no less than the second birth of fire, the fire of conscious evolution, the primal tool for the emergence of the infinite or plural subject out of its subjection to the shredding and pulverising of attention and quality that marks our times.

Revolutionary Impulse

1910, when Sri Aurobindo moved to Pondicherry, can be thought of as a watershed year. The revolutionary breakthroughs in science, industry and culture which characterised the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century in Europe, were poised to inundate the world with a new chapter of civilisation, leading into our present times. What has been called the second Industrial Revolution, inaugurating the age of electricity, mass production and the world market was zathering to unleash its global regime, one whose material and psychological effects are fully manifest today. Invasive echnologies would integrate the human individual into circuits of braided global information where subjectivity would be determined, fragmented and commodified, with little freedom of interiority, a behaviourism at the service of the nation state and the world market. At the still centre of this preparing epistemic storm, or perhaps the lull before its inexorable world action, we find Sri Aurobindo in a remote sheltered town in south India, surrounded by a handful of disciples and freedom fighters, searching for a wholeness of subjectivity with which to measure himself against the cosmos. Detached from the forces of the world, a luxury hardly available to anyone in today’s surveilled and engineered psycho-sphere, he prepared the technologies of attention and mobilised consciousness, which became the basis of his own transformation and his teaching. One may see the same revolutionary impulse that drove him to yoke his will to an anti-colonial struggle at work here, to free humankind from dependence and subjection, not merely to an alien nation, but to the bondage, limitations and maladies of his own nature, a teleology of the Machine reversed and countered by a power of creative consciousness aiming at a perfected life. Sri Aurobindo’s experiments in introspection and applied psychology were conducted with the rigour of science, using a methodical framework which was synthetic and integral. This is what he called the Seven Quartets, which are being presented here. He left his conclusions for the future, that humankind may learn to utilise, even in the midst of its subjection to the ubiquitous forces of the world, its affirmative disciplines towards freedom, wholeness, universal personhood, knowledge of oneness, creative power of a complex harmony and capacity to endure and enjoy all experiences as forms of bliss.

 

Contents

 

  Foreword vii
  Acknowledgement xv
  Abbreviations xvii
  Introduction 1
  An Incalculabe Yoga 1
  The Seven Quartets 3
  Revolutionary Impulse 4
  Psychology and its Alter-disciplines 6
  Yoga Psychology and the Integral Movement 7
  Experimental Psychologies 11
  Post-metaphysical Philosophies 14
  Postmodernism 16
  The Deleuzian Century 18
  Interlocutors 22
  Objectives 25
1. Integral Yoga Psychology and the Quartet of Perfection 27
  Contemporary Social Relevance 30
  The Divine Life: integral Being and Becoming 34
  The Seven Quartets 41
  The Quartet of Perfection or of Yoga 43
  The Two Traditions 45
  Suddhi, the Starting Point 47
  Yoga Philosophy: Vedanta 49
  Samkhya 52
  The Instrument and the Cause, Karana and Karana 56
  Suddhi or Purification 58
  Purification of the Life energy (Prana-suddhi) 58
  The Mental Instrument 62
  Mukti or Liberation 70
  Bhukti or Enjoyment 77
2. The Quartet of Peace 81
  The Progression of Equality 81
  Equality and the Purusa 83
  The Passive Disciplines of Equality 87
  Titiksa 87
  Udasinata: Being Seated Above 90
  Nati 92
  Active Disciplines of Equality 93
  Rasa 94
  Bhoga 97
  Transforming Pain to Bliss 98
  Priti 101
  Ananda 102
  Santi 104
  Sukham 105
  Hasya 107
3. The Quartet of Power 111
  A Different Relation between Soul and Nature 113
  Gendered Considerations 114
  Relationship with the Divine Mother 119
  Rooted Traditions 122
  The Siddhis of the Sakti Catustaya 128
  Viryant Soul Force and the Fourfold Personality 129
  The Soul Force of Knowledge 132
  The Soul Force of Power 136
  The Soul Force of Harmonious Interchange 139
  The Soul Force of Loving Service 142
  Sakti or Divine Power 144
  Embodying the Divine Sakti 153
  Faith and the Divine Sakti 154
4. The Quartet of Knowledge 157
  Three Forms of Knowledge: Adhibhautika, Adhidaivika, Adhyatmika 157
  Four Forms of Knowledge in Supermind: Vijnana, Prajnna, Saihjnana, Ajnana 159
  The Intuitive Mind 167
  The Goals of the Quartet of Knowledge 173
  Cognitive Knowledge: Jnana of Thought 174
  Cognition: The Lower Doublet 175
  Drsti and Sruti: The Higher Doublet of Cognition 179
  Knowledge of Time 184
  Bridging Time and Eternity 187
  Purification of the Sense Mind 188
  Other Means Towards Trikaladrsti 193
  Siddhis: Justification, Dangers and Use 194
  The Eight Occult Powers (Asta-siddhi) 197
  The Powers of Knowledge 199
  The Powers of Will 202
  The Mother’s Yoga of the Cells 205
  Powers of Being 207 207
  Ontological Identity with the States of Brahman 209
5. The Quartet of the Body 217
  Body and Spirit 220
  Freedom from Disease 222
  Awakened Body Consciousness 226
  Stages to Arogya 229
  Physical Immortality 230
  Supermind and the Mind of the Cells 235
  The Mystic Body and Physical Transformation 240
  Freedom from Laws of Matter 249
  The Physical Pranas 250
  Stages of Utthapana 253
  Beauty 255
  Bliss 257
6. The Quartet of Being 265
  Non-Dual Seeing and the Vision of Reality 266
  Mind and The Problem of Duality 269
  An Evolutionary Being-in-Becoming 272
  The One and the Infinite 274
  The Passive Brahman 279
  The Active Brahman 283
  Extending the Oneness 285
  Knowledge 286
  Correspondences 287
  Bliss, Impersonal and Personal 290
  Transcendental Empiricism 295
7. The Quartet of Action 297
  Personal Gods and an Integral Karma-Yoga 298
  Krsna 299
  Kali 301
  Purusa and Prakrti 304
  Krsna-Kali and the Delight of Becoming 306
  Work 307
  Choice of Work 309
  Stages Towards True Choice 314
  Surrender to the Divine Sakti 319
  Kama 322
  Identity in Difference 323
8. Attitudes of Self-Discipline 325
  Attitudes of Self-Discipline 326
  Resolution and Sincerity 327
  Aspiration 331
  Constant Remembrance 334
  Equality 335
  Purification 339
  Replacements 340
  Faith 341
  Quiet Mind and the Discipline of Speech 345
  Surrender 347
  The Triple Dasyam 351
9. The Conditions of Being and Knowledge 355
  Intuition and Identity 355
  Purusa 357
  Integral Realisation of Brahman 359
  Plurality of Life 363
  Bliss as Origin: Impersonal and Personal 366
  The Divine Master 369
  Evidence of the Senses 372
  The Intuitive Faculties 375
  Purification of the Mental Instrument 378
10. Power and Enjoyment 381
  The Goals of Magic 383
  Karma and the Law of Oneness 384
  Delight of Action 387
  The Four Cosmic Powers 388
  Personal Law of Becoming 391
  Adesa and Karma for Sri Aurobindo 393
  Karma and the Four Saktis 396
  Capacities of Remote Knowledge and Power 398
  Empiricism of the Records 401
  Bliss 406
  Krsna-Darana 407
  Samata 410
  Index 415

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